My personal understanding of the word thug is that a thug is someone I want to avoid because they are likely to clobber me, either to rob me or just because they think it's some kind of fun. But I see from a few very popular entries at Urbandictionary that rap music and hip-hop have gone some way to changing the meaning of thug. It seems to have become something of a legitimate badge of honor in some circles. I suppose it was a badge of honor anyway for toughs who need to prove themselves through deeds of violence. But the new meaning appears to be that someone from underprivileged origins toughs it through to be a legitimate success; so that in this case to be a thug means you're toughing it through. The origins of the word thug aren't too honorable or legitimate though. The word comes from Hindi and originally held a meaning not all that different from my original English understanding of the word.nbsp; It meant a robber or a cheat. The word root reaches back into Indo-European where teg or steg meant "to cover"; a robber wants to cover up their crime. But it was the antics of a weird Hindu religious cult a couple of hundred years ago that brought the word into English. Hinduism has numerous gods but one of the main ones is Shiva. Shiva is, among other things, the god of destruction. This particular cult though, they worshipped his wife Kali. She seems to have been a pretty nasty piece of business and her worshippers followed suit.nbsp; By some delusion they regarded killing and robbing people as some kind of act of worship. Their usual method was to strangle their victim but there are claims of poison, stabbing and dumping down wells. These guys were called the Thugs in Hindi and the word was adopted by the British government in India. A book published in 1837 called Illustrations of the History and Practices of the Thugs claims that "for many years after the British power had gained the ascendant in India the Thugs continued to practice their execrable tradehellip;the evil seems to have been regarded in much the same light as the fixed inconveniences of the climate or the accidental inclemency of unfavorable seasonsmdash;as a thing greatly to be lamented but beyond hope of remedy and which it was the part of wisdom to endure with patience." Finally a lowly civil servant named William Sleeman started to point out to his government that it was really irresponsible of any governing body to let this go on. For some time he was ignored as is the familiar lot of so many responsible civil servants even today, but finally a new Governor General arrived from England and took the issue seriously. They say it took 50 years to stamp out the cult. Today's episode brought to you by Ammon Shea's book Reading the OED.

Today's podictionary word brought to you by GoToMeeting. Try it free for 30 days by following the link www.gotomeeting.com/podcast When Pervez Musharraf resigned as Pakistan's president he gave his speech in Urdu with a sprinkling of English. I mention this not because there are hordes of people in Pakistanmdash;although there seem to bemdash;but because there is an etymological connection between the name of the language Pervez Musharraf used and today's podictionary word. The roots of Urdu as a name for a language represent a rare mashup of languages. Notably Urdu doesn't come from Urdu. This is one of those cases of one group of people applying a word to another group of people. In this case the "namers" encountered on the fringes of their empire groups of nomadic peoples wandering around with their animals.nbsp; These nomads lived in camps and so when the namers figured out how to communicate with the nomads, they named their language "the language of the camps." In Persian that comes out something like zaban i urdu. The word zaban is actually the word that meant "languge." Urdu was a word that seems to have meant "camp." Like so many other phrases through history zaban i urdu got worn down with use and abbreviated to urdu. So etymologically the name we use for the language of Pakistan actually means "camp." There is some discrepancy between dictionaries as to the ultimate source of the word urdu so I guess it's safe to say it moved around from language to language like the nomads.nbsp; A look at several dictionaries yields the following list of languages implicated in the travels of the word to English: Persian Hindustani Turkish Russian Polish German Danish Swedish Italian Spanish French Mongolian and Kalmuck (which I'd never heard of) The word hordemdash;as in "there was a horde of shoppers at the mall"mdash;is reported to have come to English from similar roots. No dictionaries actually say so but I'm interpreting that while Urdu means "language of the camps" horde must have evolved from "people of the camps" or "those who live in camps." The New Oxford American Dictionary defines horde as "chiefly derogatory, a large group of people." I think "derogatory" is a bit too strong.nbsp; "Impersonal" is more like it. Notably the homonym hoardmdash;as in "I have a hoard of candy to give out at Halloween"mdash;is not a related word. The nomads had to travel light and so left hoarding to Germanic speakers who gave the word to Old English meaning "treasure" and "hiding place."

Today's episode brought to you by Grammar Girl's new book. Look for the link at grammar.quickanddirtytips.com Nora Gold asks about the word passionate.nbsp; Nora is another one of the authors I met at a conference before the summer.nbsp; She wrote a book of short stories called Marrow and Other Stories and at her website she has free PDF downloads of a couple of those stories. Byron wrote His love was passion's essence:mdash;as a tree On fire by lightning, with ethereal flame Kindled he was, and blasted. That really does seem to be passion's essence, to be consumed.nbsp; But although Byron was talking about being consumed by passionate love, the image of being struck by lightning and bursting into flames sounds pretty painful and actually, pain is really at the root of passion. The American Heritage Dictionary tells me that there was an Indo-European word root pei to hurt. This word root made its way up into Latin where pati meant "suffer." Classical Latin is what the Romans spoke but after the end of the Roman Empire Latin was the language of literacy all over Europe and morphed into Medieval Latin.nbsp; One of the main vehicles for Latin's ongoing popularity was the church and this particular word root was applied in a particularly churchy way. About 1000 years ago passion emerged specifically applying to the suffering of Christ. It was the strength of feeling associated with what was considered to be the ultimate in suffering that infused the word passion with a meaning of "strength of feeling" about 700 years ago. From "strength of feeling," a meaning relating to love and sexual passion evolved about 400 years ago. I was interested to see that the first citation for passion as applied to sexual desire was from a book with the unlikely title of Mathematical Magick, or, The Wonders that may be Performed by Mechanical Geometry. Unlikely where sexual passion is concerned anyway. This book was written by an enlightened theologian named John Wilkins.nbsp; In it he was actually saying that the divine frees people from their lusts and passions, not writing anything remotely erotic. John Wilkins was passionate about science though as the book title suggests.nbsp; This was a kind of popular mechanics type of approach and it's notable that the book was written in English not Latin. At the time there was hot debate about whether man as created by God was centre of the universe and in particular if the earth represented a planet just like those other things up in the sky. John Wilkins wrote another book called Discourse concerning a new planet; tending to prove, that ('tis probable) our earth is one of the planets.nbsp; He was trying to show people not only that the evidence seemed to support this more humble position in the universe but also give religious arguments as to why this might be so. He was also passionate about communication which is why he didn't write his books in Latin. In fact he was one of those guys who springs up from time to time through history advocating a new universal language so that everyone from everywhere can understand each other. I guess he didn't realize that to some measure that's what Latin had been, or what English was going to become.

Today's podictionary word brought to you by GoToMeeting. Try it free for 30 days by following the link www.gotomeeting.com/podcast In 1823 Lord Byron was in Genoa in Italy writing poetry including something called The Island. In it, at one point, one character is telling another he's seen a ship. What! could you make her out? It cannot be; I've seen no rag of canvass on the sea." "Belike," said Ben, "you might not from the bay, But from the bluff-head, where I watched to-day, I saw her in the doldrums; for the wind Was light and baffling." And this is the first citation we have for the doldrums meaning a ship that is unable to make headway. As The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea explains it "[the doldrums are a] belt of low pressure that extends 5deg; to 10deg; either side of the equatorhellip;[they] were notorious in the days of sail, because vessels could become becalmed there for many days and even weekshellip;Being in the doldrums has now become synonymous with being listless, depressed, and generally stuck in a rut." It is information like this that must have been stuck in my brain somewhere and made me think that this name of a region of ocean gave us our word doldrums for being down, for feeling melancholy. And I guess it did, but I see that in fact it also has an older history, although it is a short one. That citation of Lord Byron is from 1823 but in 1812 in the newspaper The Examiner there is a citation reading "A doldrum is, we believe, the cant word for a long sleeper." So the Oxford English Dictionary has as its first and obsolete definition "slanghellip;a dull, drowsy, or sluggish fellow." It's easy to believe that sailors stuck for days or weeks in the hot, humid seas around the equator might use this word to describe the place. The OED etymology for doldrum is not too helpful, it says perhaps from dold, an early variation on dolt meaning "dull." Lord Byron is reported to have said "who would write who had anything better to do?" and I guess he found life in Genoa a little dull around the time he set doldrums to paper, because he promptly set out to join the Greek war of independence and brought along a pile of money to pay to support soldiers under his command. But the Greek military organization was in a bit of a doldrum itself, or maybe a shambles or a mess. The lousy weather didn't help and not only did Byron get discouraged he got sick and died. Maybe dull isn't so bad after all.

Today's episode brought to you by my audio-book Global Wording - The Fascinating Story of the Evolution of English. Available in downloadable form from iTunes or Audible.com or as a CD from bookstores. For more information and a few samples, go to www.globalwording.com I've recently become a member of the board of directors for an association of cottage owners.nbsp; I've been working on a strategy to help protect the natural environment around the lake.nbsp; So the word strategy is on my mind. I'll paraphrase here from the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary: strategy - the science and art of employing the political, economic, psychological, and military forceshellip;to afford the maximum support to adopted policies [to protect the bunnies and ducks]. Okay, I put that last part in myself. I don't think I'll be using military force in my strategy but the military does have a deep stake in the etymology of the word strategy. According to the American Heritage Dictionary there was an Indo-European word root ster that meant "to spread things out." I came across this root once before in the podictionary episode on the word street which came about because the Romans built their roads in layers and they called the layers strata.nbsp; The strata were called strata because each material was "spread out" before the next one was piled on top. Strategy didn't come through Latin though, instead it came through Greek. That same word root meaning "spread out" was applied to a big group of people who were spread out over an open space. Sometimes an army was a big group of people spread out over an open space and so the Greek word for army was stratos. An army needs a commander and the Greek word for a general was strategos. Of course it's the general who practices the "science and art of deploying political, economic, psychological, and military force" to achieve his purpose and so that art and science was named after him.nbsp; Since he was a strategos the art and science became a strategy. One of the rules of language is that if you don't have a word for it, you likely don't think about it much. From this little etymology you can plainly see that the ancients were pretty smart in planning out their military operations.nbsp; Yet English didn't pick up the word strategy until 1688. What does that say about England's planning capacity? I went looking for synonyms with a deeper history and believe it or not the word plan didn't arrive until 1635. But obviously the English did strategize before that and I did find an Old English word rede that seems to fit the bill.nbsp; It relates to a root meaning of "understand" and could also mean "advice," "plan" or "scheme."